We used 1 black jag for rs232/can and encoder, 3 greys with encoder and 1 grey using limit switches. The 1 black and 3 greys were for a mecanum drive, the 4th was for our arm.
1. Update firmware to 90 or 91 on both black/grey
2. we used 1 black jag as the interface
3. We used version 39 from WPI + mods
4. version 39 has a lot more monitoring, see the speed control tuning vi and dashboard. We used current, limit switches and speed monitoring back to our dashboard for testing/debug
5. If you want to use mecanum you will need to mod the CAN mecanum for speed control - not that difficult or I can find our changes.
For some reason in speed mode the motor invert on the open isn't passed through, we modified the vi to handle the invert booleans

Are you aware of any teams which did not have black jag and used a 3rd party interface successfully?

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We were the only team I saw at the Seattle regional using CAN.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ether

Does the 3rd-party (WPI) CAN mecanum VI use the Jag's built-in PID speed control, or is that the mod you are talking about ?
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That was the mod I was talking about. We had code for both the original mecanum vi and the modified vi and we used the CRio USER1 switch to switch between them. This was because we have had relability issues with encoders in previous years and we wanted a way to try both.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ether

Was your team's primary motivation for using CAN to get speed control?
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We wanted it for autonomous but we didn't get the time to test with and without speed control. We used both during the regional, a wire broke on one of the encoders and we switched speed control off. The feedback from the drivers was it drove better without speed control though that may have been because they were driving with the wiring problem before we found we had a problem.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ether

If so, did you do this because open-loop voltage control did not give the driver satisfactory control of the robot in TeleOp?
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The drivers found open-loop was easier to drive, we havent had a chance to find out why.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ether

Did you use the Jag's position control in autonomous for more accurate positioning?
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